Making Social Media Routine and Successful in your Organization
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This document provides guidance on making social media use routine and successful after the initial excitement wears off. It recommends three steps: 1) Make room for truth by facilitating experimentation and setting "safe zones" for practice, 2) Establish how to discuss topics by getting questions and deciding what information is needed, and 3) Take apart current habits and traffic sources to see how new technologies can be implemented from the user's perspective. The overall message is to focus on facilitating real discussion, staying current with information, and making changes based on measurement rather than having a long-term plan.
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Making Social Media Routine and Successful in your Organization
- 1. After the Honeymoon: Making Social Media Routine and Successful by:
- 2. The Ground Rules: Tweet stuff via #NACE11 and/or #NACE11sm I’ll try and leave time for tweets Tag @douglasLmiller with questions for after Even though I use “Social Media” I mean “digital media”
- 3. tweet this: There is no such thing as “Social Media.” We always use media. Now we do so digitally. Media is not social. People are.
- 4. After the Honeymoon: Making Social Media Routine and Successful by: http://bit.ly/humanword http
- 6. No long term plan.
- 7. Real Life is Real Time.
- 8. Strategy?!
- 9. Aliens have landed. -#Justsayin Omg! I know!-
- 10. And then?
- 11. Take these with you: Make room for the Truth. Be the Language. Reverse Engineer Everything.
- 12. Step One: Make Room for the Truth Prepare by making room for the “alien” truth. First things first – one thing at a time. This will be “The Adjustment”
- 13. Aliens. #SRSLY.
- 16. Strategy: me.
- 17. Not helpful.
- 18. Make it easy.
- 19. tweet this: Facilitate local buy-in using safe zones of practice and failure. Make it ok to experiment. Give easy options for making room for the truth.
- 20. The link is made.
- 21. Step Two: Be the Language. Establish a way of airing out vocab. Get questions coming in. Figure out what is needed, toss the rest.
- 23. tweet this: When it comes to digital media, message is 20% content and 90% context. Context is THAT important, but content can’t be any LESS important. Three keys to digital success: curation, currency, and change. It’s about feeds, not destinations.
- 24. Time enough for all of it.
- 25. Curation is your feed.
- 28. Step 3: Reverse Engineer Everything. Take apart your current content habits. Examine the traffic you already have. Investigate new tech backwards from your users’ POV
- 29. tweet this: Whenever possible, make the machines do the work, but make sure the humans do the relating.
- 30. The top of the stream.
- 31. Email lives.
- 32. Many feeds, one call to action.
- 33. A few final words about multi-media: Be visual. Successful video is intensive. Don’t forget the call to action.
- 34. Take these with you: Make room for the Truth. Be the Language. Reverse Engineer Everything. Contact me with Questions.
Editor's Notes
- After the Honeymoon: Making Social (digital) Media Routine and Successful:
- Before I begin I have a few ground rules to go over:1.) Not only do I NOT mind if you are face down in a computer or mobile device while I’m speaking, I’m hoping you’ll take anything you find useful here and immediately communicate it outward using the hashtags for today: Nace11 and nace11sm or @reply me with questions for later2.) Even though I used the term “Social Media” in the title of this presentation I’m an advocate for the movement to stop using that term altogether. Let me be clear about what I believe.
- There is no such thing as Social Media.That’s a tweetable quote, if you like. Take a moment to tell the rest of Twitter they don’t exist.Here’s what I mean by that: There have always been and will always be mediums through which we communicate, organize, and articulate. Some are digital. ALL are social because we are. Having said that, I will now proceed to talk for the next hour about something I just said doesn’t exist. Hopefully the irony will not be lost on you.
- After the Honeymoon: Making Social (digital) Media Routine and Successful:I first started thinking about the topics I’m presenting today by framing them as similar to the experiences of the newlywed.
- I wanted to express my thinking that digital media and higher education had only just begun this long, complex relationship.
- I sought even to capture the notion that - all too often - it is a relationship that is entered into impulsively and without regard for long-range planning.
- Also that there is a tendency to burn through resources quickly and leave one’s head spinning as the passion of the moment gives way to the realities of daily life.But as I began to compile the information I want for you to take with you today, I started to see another image taking shape - that the arrival of digital media on the scene has created an even more world changing impact worthy of a more spectacular metaphor.
- I’ve got two kids so, naturally, my next thought was the arrival of digital media is more like a new baby for a first time parent. Certainly that’s a life-changing event for anybody who experiences it.But there’s something so GLOBALLY shifting about the role these digital tools have assumed.The prominence these digital tools have been elevated to and the hype that surrounds them all is of a scale much more proportional to another kind of event that might serve as a better metaphor:
- Proof of the existence of extra-terrestrial life.Aliens have landed.Let me paint you picture of where I think you are.You get it. Social Media has landed and there is obviously no going back, you know that.Like a giant UFO perching itself right on top of the ivory towers of Higher Education, social media’s efficacy is no longer a theory or a veiled conspiratorial myth - it’s real and it’s here.Suddenly, the quad and the marketplace are filled with alien people speaking alien languages and sharing alien technologies; and you know there is no denying that things will never be the same again.But what now? In the face of such wide reaching change, how do you marshal the resources to compensate and take action?That’s the thing about saying that things will never be the same; you can’t just stop there.
- Just saying “Yep, things will never be the same” and stopping there is like jumping out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet and refusing to deploy the parachute - under-productive at best.You know the landscape has changed. Now it is time to take steps to compensate. It’s time to move forward by being intentional about integrating this fact into daily life. Where to start?Of all the things I say today, I’ve tried to categorize them into these three general groups of advice:
- 1. Make room for the truth2. Be the Language 3. Reverse Engineer Everything
- Step One: Make room for the alien truth - prepare for The Adjustment.Most folks working in digital media or calling themselves “social media experts” these days are going to advise you to start at what I think is closer to the end.You’re going to hear things like “set goals,” “define successes,” “determine measurement tools,” and “establish benchmarks for return on investment.”Those are all great things to do - but in my opinion, there are so many things to do before you get to those things that those who skip right to them are immediately overwhelmed and often face some serious cultural integration issues internally down the line.
- REMEMBER - ALIENS, people. ALIENS. It’s a big deal. Slow down and take it a step at a time.
- The first thing to do in this Brave New World is to identify your Ambassadors.I'm not taking about Brand Ambassadors, which is ordinarily the kind of Ambassador you'll hear someone talk about RE: social media. The Ambassadors in this context are people who help normalize these abstract ideas in YOUR culture.These folks are already inclined to believe in UFO’s (to expand the metaphor) they’re already early adopters of digital mediums so there’s less culture shift that needs to happen in them.
- We found ambassadors in our students, staff, faculty and in the community at large.For example, I have regular tutorial sessions about social and new media - exposing the overall strategy to the entire staff to build confidence about using the tools and helping them know how it all fit in to the bigger picture. We reached out to students, faculty, and staff who were early adopters anyway.For example, our school has an internal group that meets that is known as the Social Media Working Group. This is an ad-hoc committee sponsored by the folks at Enrollment Management and Marketing which meets monthly and shares best practices, tips, and general policy for DePaul University RE: social media, and our office has been a thought leader in that group.We established a single source of strategy and management for social, mobile, and new media needs that can work closely with all internal stakeholders.
- We established a single source of strategy and management for social, mobile, and new media needs that can work closely with all internal stakeholders.HOW MANY FOLKS IN THIS ROOM TODAY FEEL THEY ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES TO DEDICATE A FULL TIME STAFF MEMBER TO THIS?In our case, we elected to hire a single point person, but a committee or team of existing staff could just as easily accomplish much of what I do if approached properly and strategically, WITH ONE VERY IMPORTANT CAVEAT:You will likely require the input of an external consultant to get things organized and in place.In any case, that team becomes your team of ambassadors for your internal culture and you’re your audience at large as well. It can be one person or a thousand. Don’t have anybody at all that fits that? Hire to that ability, yes. Even if you need to bring a consultant in to lay the foundations first for a successful strategic deployment.Avoid the temptation, however, to think that you can hire any single “expert” and therefore insulate the rest of your staff from being involved with digital media.
- You have to make room for the truth. It becomes a part of what you do everyday.If aliens really did land, we wouldn’t expect for only certain people to acknowledge it had happened so the rest of us could go on about our lives as though it never happened.That’s crazy talk.
- In fact, an important part of The Adjustment is helping everyone to recognize that on some level ANYONE can be an ambassador. Taking steps to make it easy for anyone to be an ambassador can be as simple as creating a unified email signature strategy and showing folks how they can help just by doing what they always do - send and receive emails.
- TWEET MOMENT: Facilitate local buy-in using safe zones of practice and failure.Make it ok to experiment.Give easy options for making room for the truth.You have to take a reading of your internal culture to see what their tolerances are for geek speak, to understand how much push back the use and acceptance of these new tools will create, and to develop plans of deployment that are not scary, expensive, and regrettable.For our purposes, using digital media tools for collaboration as beta testers where feedback and reflection featured heavily and provide plenty of teachable moments was one way we measured those tolerances.
- In specific terms, we knew that our world was going to be talking about LinkedIn a lot more than some folks had been used to and we felt it imperative for us to be inside of those spaces and participate in conversations using those tools, so we created groups on LinkedIn that were limited to staff and faculty only in order to provide a safe “practice” ground for understanding what it was like to be in that space.
- Step Two: Be the LanguageI’m a word nut. Hang out with me for very long and you’re just as likely to hear me spouting off about Linguistics and a universal theory of phonemic emotional attachment, as you are to hear me talk about digital media.Words mean a lot, and what I find most amazing about words is how quickly we can get used to new ones.I’m not necessarily talking about learning whole other languages, but there are levels of abstraction to nearly any human activity that only those closest to the center of really have a great handle on.My brother is a truck driver and I know nothing about that world and every year we get together and have to re-learn each other’s vocab words to share a conversation.I say that to say this:There are abstract concepts (RSS, Planking, ROI, Clickthroughs, LOLZ, Pings, Lurkers, etc...) that go along with strategically deploying communication through digital mediums.Those need to be communicated to your internal culture in varying degrees and in appropriate doses.
- What seemed to work well for us was a simple glossary that gave a quick overview of each of the platforms that became a part of our overall strategy – our tactic here was to cut through some of the jargon and make for greater internal engagement. “Be the language” in this context means pick the words you know you’ll need to use and use them. Let the rest go.If you’re world is full of aliens that just landed from another planet, odds are you’re going to want to talk to them using their language, even if you don’t want to speak it everyday.
- TWEET MOMENT:When it comes to digital media, message is 20% content and 90% context. Context is THAT important, but content can’t be any LESS important.Before you go thinking that’s a typo, it isn’t. The math doesn’t need to work out .Because context is THAT important,but content can’t be any LESS important.Our strategy for content has come directly from this understanding and I have built our strategy to find these three things important: Curation, currency and change:
- What is Curation? In the last 30 years mankind has produced more information than in the previous 5,000. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about five exabytes of new information - in 2002 alone. Five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.
- What do we curate?DePaul specific information including data about events, but also universally useful information regarding the information our students need to know.Here’s a pro tip: you can and should not only curate content from other people’s website and blogs. You should curate out content from your own website If you want your audience to see it you have to put in front of them. Around our office I’m infamous for repeating “It’s about feeds – not destinations.”
- What is currency? Sometimes a mere mention has value names and photos provide context. Every message is a gift in kind Become a trusted curator of valued information and you will build currency, both with your audience and with your sources.It’s important not to confuse digital media currency with return on investment.Often others can raise awareness for you to greater effect but reciprocate appropriately.Digital media currency might mean more followers because of the right tags in a retweet, but the value for your customers is more important – they will trust you to be a good “source of sources” and that will be value that will be very hard to measure and replace.You gain real ground with any customer that is apt to give you attention via any digital medium when you can help them understand quickly what kind of value you can provide and how much of their precious time and attention you can help them conserve.
- What is change? If it is easy to confuse digital media currency achieved via optimized posts as return on investment, then how do we measure anything? What kinds of change are we seeking?Your users are going to be lurkers. Every user, no matter how deeply engaged, begins as a lurker. They poke around what’s there, see what questions have been asked and answered, and if you are lucky they try to reason how returning to this source might be beneficial to them.Allow for lurkers in your measurement and especially in your benchmarking. Look to see that point where the lurker finally takes action. How to do that is (in my opinion) the fun part.
- The wrap up and some techno-speak: Step 3. Reverse Engineer EverythingSo far I’ve covered my first two points in the “Aliens have landed” metaphor: make room for the change and be the language. Now we’re finally getting to the stuff most folks would instinctively have you look at first – return on investment, measurement, establishing benchmarks, tracking and reporting.The first steps in measurement are to examine your traffic and content flow habits as they are. Take them apart to really know how each step might fit into new technology and investigate those new technologies from your users’ points of view.Find out what channels of communication you have that already exist and that can be re-purposed – an example for us was an RSS feed of events from the university calendar.
- Final TWEET MOMENT: Whenever possible, make the machines do the work, but make sure the humans do the relating.That statement may not be all that PC when sentient robots walk the earth side by side with humans fighting for similar rights, but luckily for now it works and is still ethical.In any case, our strategy aligned with this thought and the way I deployed it was to leverage the technology offered by the “micro-blogging” service, Posterous.
- What Posterous does well is to move content around and format it appropriately for each of its destinations while simultaneously making content generation less cumbersome.We have a ton of folks have great knowledge often locked up in powerpoint presentations and word documents, and we use email a LOT. My decision to deploy Posterous as the heart of our solution was born out of those facts. Since that time, a number of services have emerged that are similar (Tumblr is one one Ping.fm and Hootsuite perform similar functions too.)
- Knowing that our folks were most accustomed to using email (because I took the time to prepare for the truth) and that there was some trepidation folks had in using social (digital) media tools (because I learned to be the language) I deduced that getting content into the message stream via email was going to be a great win for us.Any one of our staff can generate content that will in turn generate a blog post, facebook update, Tweet, social bookmark, and online photo or video when needed. Approval rests with the content team who makes sure to give a human touch.
- Our strategy is blog powered which means that all tweets, updates, etc… have a call to action that ultimately leads back to the date and time specific blog post for benchmarking and analysis for efficacy. Even content from our own website ends up as content on our blog, especially deep pages students would never have been inclined to visit.Clicks and traffic are tracked via google analytics, feedburner, widgetbox analytics, posterous, facebook, and more.Remember – it’s about feeds, not destinations.What is it about these technologies that work? In general, they are real time, user-centric, have open data access with ease of sharing, intuitive design.
- Be visual. Use images whenever you can, photos, artwork, take a look at creative commons.Video takes lots of time and money, consider making audio led slideshows.Leverage quick, simple content in any instance but never forget the call to action.
- Are you more ready for The Adjustment than you were when you came in here? Do you have other questions? Let me know. Let’s talk.1. Make room for the truth2. Be the Language 3. Reverse Engineer Everything